Tag: Modern

As I mentioned last week, I am excited to announce GNU, National University’s literary magazine published four of my poems in their Spring/Summer 2017 print issue! I wrote these poems during the Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program and they are some of my best recent work. If you don’t know about the GNU, according to their WordPress site, “the GNU seeks to create a comprehensive creative platform for both readers and writers.” The GNU goes on to describe content they are interested in:

“Who among us has never enjoyed a genre considered non-literary by some? A great horror story, an engaging science fiction tale, a compelling young adult narrative, a Sunday morning comic (or two). Who is to say these are less important to our culture than writings with a more traditional flair?

It could be argued that one must sample all types of writing in order to gain a panoramic understanding of this delicious literary soup we are lucky enough to savor. Anyway, lovers of great writing will recognize it as such regardless of genre or style. So pull a chair up to our table. That’s right. There is plenty of room and something for everyone. Enjoy.”

One of the reasons I have been hesitant to publish more of my poems on my site here is because some publications refuse to accept any “previously published” poetry. In most cases, this includes online mediums such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. I am putting together a calendar of publications where my poetry is a great fit and I don’t want to jeopardize any future opportunities. At the same time, most publications simply assume first serial rights. However, all rights revert back to contributors upon publication, so I am able to re-publish my work elsewhere providing proper acknowledgment is given to GNU Journal.

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C.K. parody t-shirt featuring the Muppets –
stolen by my sister in 1996.
Bomber Jacket from Basic Training, 1998,
disappeared during a deployment in 2005.
Four-Leaf-Clover hat, a gift from an ex-girlfriend,
thrown in a San Francisco river by my best friend.
Kangol Wool Driver Cap, black, 7¼,
left on the roof of my car in the college parking lot.
Army Battle Dress Uniform –
exchanged for Army Combat Uniform in 2006,
soon-to-be traded in for Operational Camouflage Pattern.
Hideous Christmas sweater,
decisively abandoned in a laser tag lost-&-found.
Three-piece pin-stripe suit, unworn,
donated to Goodwill Industries of Boston Massachusetts.
Eight sets of Army Desert Camouflage Uniforms,
worn on more than 55 convoys in Iraq, no longer
with us due to fair wear and tear.
Men’s Large Board Shorts, Hawaiian pattern,
taken by the wind while air-drying on A3 in Deutschland 2008.
18th Sustainment Brigade Combat Service Identification Badge,
lent to an ex-best friend in 2012. Never returned.
New pair of New Balance Fresh Foam Zantes and white running socks,
sacrificed to the mud in 2013 as I pushed a careless nurse’s car free.
“Golden Boy,” as I christened my favourite shirt,
perished after nearly 67 washing cycles.
Army Grey Physical Training Uniform –
traded in for Improved Physical Fitness Uniform in 2000,
traded in for the Army Physical Fitness Uniform in 2015.
Arizona carpenter jeans, purchased in 1997,
threadbare and out-of-style according to another ex.
Countless men’s sweatshirts, extra large,
now hanging in countless ex’s closets.
No tears for the lost,
for those tired, poor, huddled masses of clothes.

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The only thing we have to fear is fear
itself — thus spake Franklin Delano Roo—
sevelt; thirty-second President of
the United States of America,
but, I fear the sonnet, whether Petrar—
chan, Italian, Shakespearean, or an—
y of the countless sub-sonnets,
the bastard sonnets: caudates, curtails, stretched
(which is exactly what it sounds like), the
submerged, redoublés, sequences, and the
Spenserian (oh please); I fear forced rhyme,
I fear writing to meet a quota of
lines; I list rhyme schemes with Ponzi’s schemes and
fear the words, the lines, the rhymes, the inspir—
ation will one day run dry and I will
be left with a blank sheet, hundreds of blank
sheets of paper and hundreds of favoured
pens such that the writing is never com—

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I took another week off from posting. This past week I returned from two weeks in Wisconsin for an Army Officer development school. The Command and General Staff Officer’s Course (CGSOC) is the next level of education for my promotion to Lieutenant Colonel! I met some great Officers, made friends, and learned a great deal. The course itself isn’t difficult with everyone working together, but the reading was intense, lasting until past midnight most days. I needed a break from posting and it has taken me just about an entire week to recuperate.

This blog isn’t about my experiences in the military, but it is a large part of who I am. Not that I feel I need to explain myself. It was a great two weeks. And now – on to the poeming!

~†~

Variations by Federico García Lorca

Poetry in Motion: 100 Poems From the Subways & buses, W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 was one of the first poetry books I remember buying in my youth. Back then I didn’t know Poetry in Motion was a larger scale project from Poetry Society of America. I saw a cool little book sitting on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and flipped through it. As far as short anthologies go, it’s a great introduction to poetry for beginners. It features poets from Dante Alighieri to Langston Hughes to Shel Silverstein and more! Every poem is accessible for any level poet.

The poems from this book appeared only in New York City as a collaboration between the Poetry Society of America and MTA New York City Transit. There is a second book called Poetry in Motion from Coast to Coast: 120 poems from the subways and the buses which includes poems in subways, buses, and even billboards in Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Dallas, Fort Collins, Houston, Iowa City, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Pioneer Valley, and Washington, D.C. I love that this program has made a lasting impact on so many lives around the country! In the introduction to the second book, they quote from a letter written to MTA New York City Transit which has received hundreds of correspondence about the program, “I look forward to riding the subway because I know I’m going to discover a very special poem that will add meaning to my life.”

I have not been fortunate enough to live in a city that takes poetry seriously enough to post poems in public transportation. This past year, I successfully petitioned Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry to sign a proclamation for National Poetry Month, but I’m still working on poetry events. Jacksonville is a huge city with a bustling art scene! We should be able to band together in our common interests and even get other people interested in poetry!

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The most recent broadside. “Thistle” Words by Jennifer Jean. Art by David Bernardy.

If you’ve never heard the term, a broadside is defined by Merriam-Webster as

(1): a sizable sheet of paper printed on one side (2): a sheet printed on one or both sides and folded b: something (such as a ballad) printed on a broadside.

I love when companies or individuals define a word with that word. Sure, a broadside is printed on a broadside! 🙂

Broadsided Press is a great literary magazine working to resurrect the broadside and keep it alive for generations to come. Their website provides a succinct summary for the history of broadsides as well as a nice “About” page explaining their humble, yet far-reaching mission of “putting literature and art on the streets”. One of the coolest things about Broadsided Press is that they offer 229 FREE broadsides for anyone to download, print, and display where they choose!

Check their submission guidelines here and if you have an account, follow them on Submittable.

Keep writing and challenge yourself to pair your poems with art! Find an artist or poet to collaborate with. Whether the collaboration is intentional or not, the results could be amazing. It’s not unlike ekphrasis.

Cheers,

Bryan

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I am proud to announce that Twitterization Nation selected me as one of their featured poets for August! They chose me along with five other poets for their website series and subsequent online literary magazine. The five other poets are Carrie Danaher Hoyt, Richard Green, Charika Swanepoel (@CharikaSW), Elisabeth Horan, and Ken Woodall. If you are not familiar with Twitterization’s work, I enjoy their description and call for submissions:

“We are seeking “Twitterized” poems that are 140 characters or less (however, we have already accepted longer poems) to be featured as a weekly guest through our Twitterization Nation blog, Twitter, and Facebook sites. In addition, we plan to use this collection as our “Preview” Issue for our online literary magazine.”

I first came across Twitterization Nation during Rattle magazine’s Monthly Ekphrastic Poetry Challenge for June 2017. The art was Ryan Schaufler’s photograph “No Name #2” for which I wrote a piece entitled, “Good Hope Road [or, Nostalgia is a Fond Memory]”. I did not win, but I pressed on and submitted seven poems to their website. The poems they are using August 1-7, 2017 are “Red City”, “Eyes”, “Paint by Numbers”, “Scratch Hill”, “Surfin’ Byrd”, “Wet Puppy”, and “Bus Stop”.

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I had no idea this week what I was going to write about. I decided to focus on a unique poet I found recently. Unless I write it down, I never remember how I discover particular poems or poets. It may have been that someone posted or shared on Facebook or reTweeted on the Twitters. I saw the poet’s name attached to an old-timey picture of a pipe-smoking gentleman and I thought nothing of it. Then I saw another post and that, too, passed. Later I tried to remember the name as best I could so I could look him up. I wanted to find him again because of a visual poem I remembered.

One of Bilston’s most recent poems, and the one that I saw, is “Cell”:

I’m not here to critique the individual poems so I will let you read for yourself and make your own judgments. I am impressed how Bilston uses everything at his disposal in fresh ways. To use Microsoft Excel and play with the language in the cells is fun!

Here is another poem in which Bilston plays with Venn diagrams. A Venn diagram, named after John Venn (1834–1923), an English logician is “a diagram representing mathematical or logical sets pictorially as circles or closed curves within an enclosing rectangle (the universal set), common elements of the sets being represented by the areas of overlap among the circles (Google)”.

Finally, here is a third poem in which Bilston used of the layout on the page to play with words making them look like falling rain. E. E. Cummings used similar techniques with typography. Check out “(IM)C-A-T(MO)” and “l(a” if you are interested. Here is Bilston’s “A Leaky Weekend”:

I haven’t found much biographical information on Bilston, but that is part of his allure. Actually, Bilston may not even be a male poet, she may be a poetess! Bilston has a WordPress site and this is directly from his “About” page:

“Frequently described as the “Poet Laureate of Twitter”, Brian Bilston is a poet clouded in the pipe smoke of mystery. Very little is known about him other than the fragments of information revealed on social media: his penchant for tank tops, his enjoyment of Vimto, his dislike of Jeremy Clarkson.

In 2014 he became the first person to retain the title of Pipe Smoker of the Year [Poetry section] and, over the years, he has won numerous awards for cycling proficiency, first aid, and general tidiness. He won the 2015 Great British Write Off poetry prize for a poem disguised in a Venn diagram.

His first collection of poetry You Caught the Last Bus Home will be published later this year with Unbound. You can find a short film about it, how to support it, and get your name in the back of it, here:

I don’t know where all of these titles came from. Robert Lee Brewer was ceremonially dubbed the Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere. Now we have Brian Bilston dubbed the Poet Laureate of Twitter. I checked his social media sites to hunt for an origin story. I found these facts:

Bilston has been blogging since at least November 2013 on WordPress!

He has been on Twitter since August 2013. His short bio on Twitter simply reads: “Ceci n’est pas un poème,” which translates to “this is not a poem.”

The oldest Facebook post I can find from him is November 22, 2014.

I am looking forward to purchasing his book You Caught the Last Bus Home soon!

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I’m on vacation this week so I’ve been writing a short post throughout this past week and scheduled it to publish this morning at 1000hrs EST. I hope you’ve all had a great week!

The homepage of the Academy of American Poets features a daily poem known as Poem-A-Day. The following description tells you everything you need to know about the program so I won’t belabor the point:

“Poem-a-Day is the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 200 new, previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets each year. On weekdays, poems are accompanied by exclusive commentary by the poets. The series highlights classic poems on weekends. Launched in 2006, Poem-a-Day is now distributed via email, web, and social media to 350,000+ readers free of charge and is available for syndication. For more information about how to syndicate Poem-a-Day, contact poem-a-day@poets.org.”

I never knew the Academy published a book until I stumbled across this article. You can order the book directly from the Academy’s online store (recommended). You can also pick it up from several online retailers. The Academy’s website describes the book in a single, concise sentence:

“Inspired by Poem-a-Day—the original and only daily digital poetry series featuring over 200 new, previously unpublished poems by today’s talented poets each year with classic poems on the weekends—this new book includes poems by John Ashbery, Rita Dove, U.S. Poet Laureate Juan Felipe Herrera, and many more.”

The description on Amazon.com is surprisingly more in-depth, though I don’t necessarily think it needs to explain the entire contents of the book.

“For 80 years, the Academy of American Poets has been one of the most influential and respected champions of contemporary American poetry. Through their successful Poem-a-Day online program, the Academy continues to celebrate verse by delivering poems to thousands of e-mail subscribers each morning. Now for the first time, the poems selected by the Academy for this program are available in book form so that they can be collected and savored.

Loosely organized according to the flow and themes of the seasons (for example, the month of February includes poems on love, lust, and heartache), this substantial volume is designed to encourage the daily practice of reading poetry. A thematic index is included so that poems can be sought out for popular occasions such as marriage, graduation, and holidays, or enjoyed any day of the year.”

I plan on picking this book up soon! For now, the Poem-A-Day column has introduced me to an incredible amount of new poets and styles. It has also inspired several of my own poems whether emulating the featured poem, responding to it in “conversation”, or picking it apart.